Finite velocity effect of ultralight vector dark matter in pulsar timing arrays

Abstract Pulsar timing array (PTA) collaborations have recently reported evidence of the stochastic gravitational waves. In addition to gravitational wave signals from cosmological or astrophysical origins, PTAs are also capable of detecting coherently oscillating ultralight dark matter. This study investigates the PTA response to ultralight vector dark matter, incorporating the realistic finite velocity effects ( v ∼ 10 -3 ) in our galaxy. Using a rigorous calculation framework, we demonstrate that both the timing residual amplitude (for deterministic signals) and the angular correlations (for stochastic backgrounds) depend sensitively on individual pulsar distances. Significantly, we find that the timing residuals are dominated by the Newtonian potential, contradicting prior studies which identified the curvature perturbation and tensor part of metric perturbation as the leading contributions. As expected, the PTA response to vector dark matter exhibits a characteristic anisotropic signature, making it distinguishable from the isotropic signal of scalar dark matter.